Behind the Front Page: Organizational Self-Renewal in Metropolition Newspapers

by Chris Argyris

Behind the Front Organizational Self-Renewal in Metropolition Newspapers (The Jossey-Bass behavioral science series) (Hardcover) by Chris Argyris

305 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1974

About the author

Chris Argyris is a director of elite strategy consulting firm, the Monitor Group, and is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.

Agyris's early research focused on the unintended consequences for individuals of formal organizational structures, executive leadership, control systems, and management information systems, and on how individuals adapted to change those consequences. He then turned his attention to ways of changing organizations, especially the behavior of executives at the upper levels of organization.

During the past decade, Argyris has been developing, a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning (not just behavior) becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book is obviously dated (early 1970s), it was still extremely interesting to get Argyris' take on the newspaper industry and to see his philosophy/methods applied there. As usual with most older works on journalism, the thing that is perhaps most striking is how much things have stayed the same. He writes that out of the all the organizations he had studied, he had never studied one with such a strong level of resistance to learning and change, even though they recognized the need for change. Ha.

The middle of the book reads essentially like field notes, but the first and last few chapters are good.